The comment of a true post-modernist.  Truth is what we want it to be I guess?  Of course humans are capable of critical research and sober assessments, if I don't believe that then I must surely give up any faith I have in humanity to begin with.  We are not strictly creatures of emotion, regardless what philosophers like Foucault say.

If I may butt in for a moment...perhaps you will both disagree with me, but...I think that both of you are correct.  How can that be?  I don't think that what each of you are saying is mutually exclusive.  On one hand, there certainly are objective ways of presenting facts.  On the other hand, there are subjective accounts of those facts, all of which can be right.  Note here that by subjective I mean that the accounts will differ from person to person, rather than in the sense that they are arbitrary. Think of it this way - five people can write biographies of the same person based on the same objective set of facts.  All five biographies will be different, yet all of them may be objectively true and correct as well.  The differences can be attributed to a variety of reasons, including research methodology, the background of the researcher, and even the length of the manuscript.  So there are both elements of subjectivity and objectivity involved because a subject (i.e. the author) writes about an object (i.e. an historical event).  My two cents.

Well, I think it's subjective because it's based on subjective criteria, such as those I had mentioned (e.g. research methodology, etc.).  This doesn't mean it's subjective as in up to arbitrary preference; in other words, this is not the same kind of approach that allows a person to say “I like vanilla ice cream” as a valid subjective statement.  I don't know of any author who doesn't try to be “absolutely objective” in the sense that even the most far-out people attempt to frame history the way it “really happened”.  Even an opinionated author tries to argue based on facts that he/she thinks are objective, even if that person is really far off in terms of what he/she is using. 

... History is made of human facts; it's not chemistry , physics or mathematics ! ...

I think we have an agreement.

Wally, you should look for a job with the UN  😀

I agree with you Scout but you can't obliterate your background, I mean your education, your culture, your ideals even if you want to reach perfection. That's why I believe historians, as human being, can tend to be perfectible but might mar as well.

I will continue to seek objectivity in my writing.  There is nothing I dislike more in history than when a historian displays prejudice in his writing.  Prejudice or bias is OK in politics but not in history.  That is one of the reasons I am down on revisionists so much.  Revisionism is no more than disguised political activism for the most part.  I don't care about a historians politics anymore than I care about a celebrities.

From my perspective, what I see most prevalent that I don't like are historians who focus on particular matters from the get go.  For example, there are a lot of gender and "queer" studies that I find going on.  Sometimes the research is insightful (e.g. cultural expectations of women from previous ages), but with so much of this I have to ask "why?"  Why so much attention being paid to these areas?  I think in the end, the focus of studies is rooted in political activism, even if the findings aren't necessarily revisionist in themselves.  The ramification of this is that more money goes toward researchers who study these things, and less money toward researchers who study the more important issues of history (IMO).